Big Machine Read online

  ALSO BY VICTOR LAVALLE

  Slapboxing with Jesus

  The Ecstatic

  FOR OAKLAND,

  CITY FULL OF GOOD

  “Nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired.”

  —FROM JOHN CARPENTER’S The Thing

  1

  We Like Monsters

  1

  DON’T LOOK FOR DIGNITY in public bathrooms. The most you’ll find is privacy and sticky floors. But when my boss gave me the glossy envelope, the bathroom was the first place I ran. What can I say? Lurking in toilets was my job.

  I was a janitor at Union Station in Utica, New York. Specifically contracted through Trailways to keep their little ticket booth and nearby bathroom clean. I’d done the same job in other upstate towns, places so small their whole bus stations could’ve fit inside Union Station’s marbled hall. A year in Kingston, six months in Elmira. Then Troy. Quit one and find the next. Sometimes I told them I was leaving, other times I just disappeared.

  When I got the envelope, I went to the bathroom and shut the door. I couldn’t lock it from the inside so I did the next best thing and pulled my cleaning cart in front of the door to block the way. My boss was a woman, but if the floors in front of the Trailways booth weren’t shining she’d launch into the men’s room with a fury. She had hopes for a promotion.

  But even with the cart in the way I felt exposed. I went into the third stall, the last stall, so I could have my peace. Soon as I opened the door, though, I shut it again. Good God. Me and my eyes agreed that the second stall would be better. I don’t know what to say about the hygiene of the male species. I can understand how a person misses the hole when he’s standing, but how does he miss the hole while sitting down? My goodness, my goodness. So, it was decided, I entered stall number two.

  The front of the envelope had my name, written by hand, and nothing else. No return address in the corner or on the back, and no mailing address. My boss just said the creamy yellow envelope had been sitting on her desk when she came in that morning. Propped against the green clay pen holder her son made in art class.

  I held the envelope up to the fluorescent ceiling lights and saw two different papers inside. One a long rectangle and the other a small square. I tapped the envelope against my palm, then tore the top half slowly. I blew into the open envelope, turned it upside down, and dropped both pieces of paper into my hand.

  “Ricky Rice!”

  I heard my name and a slap against the bathroom door. Hit hard enough that the push broom fell right off my cleaning cart and clacked against the tile floor. You would’ve thought a grenade had gone off from the way I jumped. The little sheets of paper slipped from my palm and floated to that sticky toilet floor.

  “Aw, Cheryl!” I shouted.

  “Don’t give me that,” she yelled back.

  I walked out the stall to my cleaning cart. Lifted the broom and pulled the cart aside. Didn’t even have time to open the door for Cheryl, she just pushed at it any damn way. I flicked the ceiling lights off, like a kid who thinks the darkness will hide him.

  I’m going to tell you something nice about my boss, Cheryl McGee. She could be sweet as baby’s feet as long as she didn’t think you were taking advantage. When I first moved to Utica, she and her son even took me out for Chicken Riggies. It was a date, but I pretended I didn’t know. The stink of failure had followed my relationships for years, and I preferred keeping this job to trying for love again.

  Now she stood at the bathroom door, trying to peek around me. A slim little redhead who’d grown her hair down to her waist and wore open-toed sandals in all but the worst of winter.

  “Someone’s in there?” she asked, looked up at the darkened lights.

  “Me,” I said.

  She pointed her chin down, but her eyes up at me. She thought she looked like a mastermind, dominating with her glare, but I’d been shot at before. Once, I was thrown down a flight of stairs.

  “I mean, is there anyone in there that I can’t fire?”

  Oop. I lifted the broom and shook it.

  “I was just sweeping,” I said.

  Cheryl nodded and stepped back two paces.

  “I don’t mind breaks, Ricky, you know that.” She took out her cell phone and flipped it open, looked at the face. “But I need this station looking crisp first thing in the morning.”

  “I’ll be done in a minute,” I said.

  Cheryl nodded, reached back, and swept her hand through her waist-length hair. The gesture didn’t look like flirtation, just hard work.

  “Hey! What did that letter say?”

  I looked back into the bathroom. “Don’t know yet.”

  She nodded and squeezed her lips together. “Well, I’d love to know,” she said, and smiled weakly.

  “Me too,” I told her, not unkindly.

  Then, of all things, she gave me a limp salute with her right hand. After that she turned in her puffy gray boots and walked toward the ticket booth.

  THE BATHROOM’S WINDOWS were a row of small frosted glass rectangles right near the ceiling. They let in light, but turned it green and murky. Now, as I crept back to the second toilet stall, I imagined I was walking underwater, and felt queasy. I opened the door to find the first piece of paper right where I’d dropped it. And I recognized it immediately.

  A bus ticket.

  I bent at the knees and braced one hand against the stall wall for balance. My right leg ached something awful. I even let out an old man’s groan as I crouched, but that kind of ache was nothing new. I’d felt forty ever since I was fifteen.

  I held the ticket at an angle so I could read it in the hazy light.

  One way, from Union Station to Burlington, Vermont.

  An eleven- or twelve-hour trip if you figured all the station stops between here and there. The date on the ticket read Thursday, the twenty-first of January, just three days off. The name of the company on the top was Greyhound. I worked for Trailways. It sounds silly, but the logo made the ticket feel like contraband. I leaned back, out of the stall, and peeked at the bathroom door to make sure I was still alone.

  I checked the back of the ticket for something, a note, an explanation. Nothing. Then I remembered that I’d seen two silhouettes through the envelope.

  I ducked my head to the left, looking to the floor of the sanitary first stall, but it hadn’t landed there. Then I looked to my right and saw that little cream-colored sheet, not much bigger than a Post-it, flat on the floor of filthy old stall number three.

  Let me be more precise.

  Flat on the floor, in a gray puddle, in filthy old stall number three.

  Forget it.

  Better to leave it behind than dip fingers in the muck on that floor. Even wearing gloves didn’t seem like enough protection. Maybe a hazmat suit.

  Leave it there. Make peace with a little mystery.

  I stood and rubbed my bad knee, even turned to leave, but you know that old saying about curiosity: curiosity is a bastard.

  I opened the door of stall number three and tried not to look at the bowl itself, or at all that had smeared and splashed along the seat and the back wall. I opened my mouth to breathe, but the faint whiff of filth, like a corrupted soul, haunted me. It made my eyes tear up. Even my ears seemed to ring. I bet I looked like a nerve gas victim.

  So I used the toe of my boot to tug the sheet of paper toward me, but it wouldn’t move. I had to use my hand.

  I lurched my middle finger forward, even as I pulled my head back, and touched the corner of the soaked little sheet. I flicked at it and flicked at it, but the damned thing barely shifted. I had no choice.

  I picked the paper up, right out of the muck. The gray liquid didn’t even run down my fingers, it just clung, like jelly, to the tips.
It was cold and lumpy. My skin went numb. The wet paper lay flat in my palm; I peeled it off with my left hand, then held it to the greenish light of the windows.

  “Ricky Rice!”

  “Aw, Cheryl!” I shouted.

  “Enough of that! You get out here!”

  I would, but not yet. I stepped out of the stall and rose onto my toes, getting the soaked sheet as close to the windows as possible. I could see black ink on the paper. Make out the same handwriting that had scribbled my name on the outside of that envelope.

  “I mean it, Ricky.”

  Cheryl pushed and strained at the door, and the wheels of my cleaning cart squeaked as they rolled. I blew on the paper to dry it. The cursive was small, but neat, legible.

  The wooden door swung open. I heard its steel handle clang against the stone wall.

  I paid no more attention to Cheryl because now I could read the two lines of the note:

  You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002.

  Time to honor it.

  Without thinking, purely automatic, I walked back into that filthy toilet stall and flushed the note away. But not the ticket.

  2

  THREE DAYS I thought about that note. Thought about it, repeated it in my mind, tried to forget it. But on the third day I showed up at my job with a packed duffel bag, which I stored in my locker, my mind not yet made up.

  Cheryl kept to herself that morning, which was for the best. If she’d chatted with me like usual, I might’ve admitted what I was considering and she’d have convinced me to stay. It was stupid to do otherwise in 2005. Lots of people were already losing jobs down here in the lower sector. The rest of the country hadn’t been sucker punched yet. The bad news hadn’t trickled up, but it would. Cheryl would’ve pointed all this out, and I would’ve agreed, ripped up the ticket, and taken my duffel bag home at the end of the shift. But I wanted to make up my own mind about this, so my cleaning took on a meditative silence. The only sounds I heard as I wiped down her computer screen were the growling winds outside her office window.

  The outdoor crew worked on the other side of the glass, shoveling in the storm. I knew the guys who were doing it, and I sympathized. The snow had been up to my shins when I came in at eight, and it hadn’t let up for an hour.

  I washed windows, emptied trash, dust mopped and wet mopped the Trailways area, and all the while I wondered what to do when the clock struck noon. The bus wasn’t actually leaving until twelve twenty-five, but where’s the poetry in that?

  By eleven I’d done as much in three hours as I would’ve stretched to eight on a normal day. If I did split on that bus, at least Cheryl couldn’t say I’d left her with a messy station.

  But where was I going? Burlington, Vermont? What kind of black man accepts an unsigned invitation to the whitest state there is? There’d been that sting on television where police told deadbeat dads they’d won the lottery, and arrested the guys when they showed up to collect. Maybe that’s what this ticket was about. I wasn’t a father to anyone, but I’d sure made some bad plays in my life. I wondered if I had any open warrants floating around.

  Or could something good be waiting for me there?

  Before I could go into the bathroom and wipe down the counters for the tenth time, one of the guys from the grounds crew, a bald guy with a face like a turtle, asked me to go drop salt on the sidewalks. I might’ve argued with him if his skin hadn’t been blue.

  I went out into the bright white cold with a ten-pound bag. I tossed the salt, and when that wasn’t enough, I grabbed another bag. I didn’t bother with my gloves, and pretty soon my hands dried out. Digging into the salt made my fingertips bleed.

  It only took me about fifteen minutes to do one side of the station. Then I moved out to the parking spaces, but when I looked back at the building, it had disappeared. The snow came down like a shroud and I couldn’t see the cars behind me, and I stood alone in the storm.

  You made a promise in Cedar Rapids in 2002.

  Time to honor it.

  How did they know?

  Wind got into the hood of my parka and raked across my face, so I shut my eyes and moved with one hand out in front of me. I was so lost I might’ve been walking down the middle of the train tracks, wouldn’t have known until the locomotive stomped me.

  And who were they?

  Then my fingers felt a hard surface, and before I could slow down, I walked into it, face-first into the brick wall of Union Station. The doors I’d come through stood only five feet to my left. When I walked back into the station, I felt embarrassed, like everyone had seen me bash my face, and I went straight for the bathroom. I passed the grounds crew drinking coffee on the long benches, and their slurps sounded like snickering. The station seemed unfamiliar and slightly hostile now. For a moment I wondered if I was in the wrong place.

  That damn bathroom snapped me back to reality. I’d just cleaned the place at ten forty-five, and an hour later it was vile. Someone had dumped handfuls of paper towels into one sink, then wet the mess until it turned to mush. Why? What the hell joy did it bring? There’s a specific kind of guy who does this gutless vandalism, either in sinks or toilet bowls. I always imagine he’s got a weak chin and a crooked spine.

  The floors were murky with slush, so I mopped. I cleared the paper towel mush from the sink and checked the stalls. When I reached stall three, I opened the door slowly, afraid to find someone had snuck in through a window and vomited across the tiles. Thankfully, no.

  But someone had added new graffiti. Two sentences, scratched into the paint with a blue pen.

  “Suck a dickrub.”

  “Buttsex happened here.”

  As I got on that twelve twenty-five P.M. Greyhound bus, I felt absolutely no regrets.

  3

  NO REGRETS until about fifteen minutes into the ride. We left on time, which was a surprise in the middle of a snowstorm, but the driver didn’t seem like a time-waster. Not the friendliest dude you ever met, he snatched tickets from people’s hands as they boarded, but better that kind than the one who’d laze around the station chatting with the other drivers. Soon as he pulled out the station, the driver became our concentrated captain, his entire focus on the snowy terrain.

  We weren’t a full busload, maybe three quarters. I had a small Hispanic woman next to me. Me the aisle, she the window. She’d fallen asleep before the driver started the engine, and I wondered what she might be escaping or what mystery she might be moving toward.

  I became so curious I felt like shaking her awake and asking, because the insanity of my own choice became clearer with each block we left behind. I watched the streets I’d crossed every morning on my way to the station, Railroad Street, Broad Street, North Genesee, and felt as though I were saying good-bye to three of my coworkers. And that’s when I really understood: I quit my job.

  I quit my job.

  I was screaming inside my skull, I quit my job! I am forty years old and I just quit my job! What the hell was I thinking? I grabbed the arm rests and squeezed them so hard the plastic should’ve cracked.

  I just felt so damn scared.

  But it had only been a few minutes. We weren’t even on the highway yet, though I could see the on-ramp in the distance. Flurries of snow slapped against the windshield, and the driver turned the wipers on just as he approached a red light. The driver stopped at the crossroads, and I shook in my seat.

  Just get out now and go back. Cheryl won’t even have noticed. Tell her you left for lunch.

  But then the bus moved again. We reached the on-ramp. But, even now, there was still time! The bus skulked at the top of the ramp as the driver waited to merge. The snow came down so thick it could’ve hidden an eighteen-wheeler.

  So I had one last chance to escape. I could holler to be let off and go back to the safety of a regular paycheck. I found myself on my feet before realizing I’d even moved. I grabbed the headrest of the empty seat in front of me, stepped one foot into the aisle, but then a voice shouted behind me.<
br />
  “Negro, sit down!”

  Who else could the voice be talking to? There were other Negroes on the bus (if you want to use that term), but none were on their feet. And do you know the craziest part? The most shameful part? I listened. I sat down.

  As soon as I did, I became angry, at myself really, and turned around to snap at the speaker, but lost my voice when I saw the Negro who’d done the shouting. (I refuse to say African-American, it just takes too damn long.)

  “Sit down and hear some truth,” the man said, squinting in my direction.

  This guy. He was three-quarters bum and, unfortunately, one-quarter legal ticket holder. He stepped into the aisle, grabbing the headrests on either side of him for balance.

  “We are at war, you people. America is in a fight!”

  And with that, thirty-seven passengers groaned as one. Those of us who were awake looked toward the front of the bus, at the driver, for help.

  But the driver had abandoned us. He leaned forward in his seat and held the steering wheel even tighter, as if to say, Can’t you see how hard I’m working?

  “I’m not talking about Iraq. I’m talking about the battle here! On our soil. In our souls.”

  We were on our own. Just us.

  Once this became clear, the hobo paced the aisle. When he passed me, I got to see him better. He stooped when he walked, even though he was clearly younger than me. A slim body, but a puffy face, the blown-out nose of a lifetime drinker. I’ll bet you could get tipsy licking the sweat on his forehead. I’m sorry to say this, but the man looked like a goblin.

  “What kind of fight am I talking about?” he continued. “I’m talking about faith, people. Faith and belief.”

  Oh, no. One of those.

  I would’ve liked it better if he’d just panhandled. Give him a few dollars and he’d be satisfied, but the religious types required a different reward.